Traditional IT infrastructure suppliers had better watch out, as Amazon Web Services (AWS) is coming for their lunch, having already doubled its growth in Blighty over the last year - according to research.
During 2015 the outfit posted bumper UK revenue growth, up 45 per cent to £254m, according to TechMarketView's top 20 …

“My own story would not have been possible but for the democratizing force of Microsoft technology reaching me where I was growing up,” CEO Satya Nadella told shareholders this week.
But the price of that “democratizing force” is about to go up, with Britons uniquely singled out. Microsoft has reiterated to Azure customers …

Fujitsu has launched a joint venture to supply the snowbound, sausage-and-root-veg-loving residents of Finland with scrummy salad all year round as part of its efforts to make farming a cloud-based endeavour.
Fujitsu Greenhouse Technology Finland Oy, which will be jointly financed with local horticulturalists Robbe's Little …

HPE is making almost twice as much revenue from shipping servers into the supercomputer market as Dell EMC.
According to our sister publication The Next Platform, “Servers are the key component of HPC systems, and so sales of servers into the HPC space is a good proxy for the overall health of the HPC sector.
“In the first …

No man is an island, nor is OpenStack removed from the fates of two of its – until recently – best-known names.
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise was once the largest single contributor to OpenStack. Now, HPE is getting rid of its OpenStack engineers as it turns over responsibility for its OpenStack work to MicroFocus under a deal …

The world’s fastest quantum simulator models an interaction between a many-body system of more than 40 atoms within one billionth of a second, according to research published on Wednesday.
Replicating a many-body system experimentally is a lively area of research, as it gives scientists a way to study quantum mechanical …

Microsoft has joined The Linux Foundation as a Platinum member, the highest level of membership. The news was announced at the company's Connect developer event in New York.
The Linux Foundation is a non-profit trade association which supports and promotes the Linux operating system and related projects, including Node.js, Xen …

Traditional IT outsourcing has "had its heyday", chief technology officer Joseph Reger of traditional-IT-outsourcer-turned-wannabe-digital-upstart Fujitsu has said.
Speaking to The Register at the Fujitsu Forum trade event in Munich, he said: "I don't think it's had its day completely yet, because that means it would not be a …

Japanese tech godzilla Fujitsu has insisted it is not exiting the PC market despite being in talks with Chinese rival Lenovo to offload its devices unit.
Speaking at the Fujitsu Forum trade fair event in Munich, head honcho for Fujitsu in Europe, Middle East and India Duncan Tait said: "We are very clearly in the PC business" …

Fujitsu’s plans to axe 1,800 jobs in the UK despite making £86.5m in profit last year is a necessary boost to margins which are “significantly below market expectation” – the firm’s UK and Ireland chair Michael Keegan has said.
The Unite union announced fresh strike action at the firm’s Manchester site today to coincide with …

Teradici's launched a new range of zero clients powered by silicon it did not design, a departure from its usual practice the company hopes will spread its PCoIP protocol far and wide.
Teradici's meat and potatoes is virtual workspaces delivered as nothing but pixels: all the compute happens in the server and zero clients do …

"No comment" is what SimpliVity usually says to questions about a rumoured takeover by HPE (it's what HPE says too).
But SimpliVity has revealed more – stuff that can be taken as saying it would be a really good bride.
"First, we just closed Q3, which we have not yet announced," said CEO Doron Kempel. "Results were very good …

At least five Russian banks weathered days-long DDoS attacks this week.
A wave of assaults began on Tuesday afternoon and continued over the next two days. Victims include Sberbank and Alfabank, both of which confirmed DDoS attacks on their online services, RT reports.
The attacks were powered by compromised IoT devices, …

Flash SSD is changing the way that we store data. Vendors would like you to use it for all of your applications – and you probably will at some point – but which applications does it make most sense for today, and which might you have to work a little harder on to justify its use?
Some rarified high-performance applications …

If customer spending on cloudy infrastructure and platform services in Q3 was a tin of beans, then a full-bellied AWS might have used the resulting wind to power its bit barns.
The global IaaS and PaaS markets grew to a little more than $10bn during the quarter, up 53 per cent year on year, and AWS accounted for almost one …

A second wave of double-digit price hikes are coming to a reseller or retailer near you from the start of next month, both Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Lenovo have confirmed.
Since the referendum, the UK's currency has fallen from $1.49 to £1 to $1.21, a drop of 18.7 per cent and many IT makers have reacted, from the cloud …

Three hundred unionised Fujitsu workers braved the bitter cold on Monday to attend the first of a two-day UK strike over pay, pensions and job security.
The brothers downed tools for 24 hours last week in protest of work conditions, and turned out again today, leafleting current and prospective punters in Salford's media city …

The UK government could save £2bn by 2020 by overhauling its clunky technology and legacy contracts and shifting citizens to digital services, according to the Institute for Government.
The independent charity's report claims that savings through digital have so far been minimal. Far more could be saved with a proper focus on …

Up to 300 workers at Japanese IT godzilla Fujitsu are to strike over pay and pensions next week in Manchester, UK.
The Unite union members claim that the company has been cutting pay rates for years, despite healthy profits and increases to senior management pay.
The union also accused Fujitsu of failing to address a …

The Home Office has extended its mega Fujitsu contract to 2018, meaning that when the contract ends it will have been running for the best part of two decades.
That is in contrast to the Cabinet Office's long-standing goal to get government departments to break up their expensive legacy contracts with single suppliers.
The …

Fujitsu is in talks with Lenovo to offload its PC arm to its Chinese rival.
If the talks are successful, Fujitsu will continue to sell and support own-brand PCs, designed and made by Lenovo.
The two companies are looking to the Development Bank of Japan to bankroll the deal.
Fujitsu is currently the 10th biggest PC …

Gartner has published a distributed file systems and object storage magic quadrant with the top three suppliers being Dell EMC, followed by IBM and Scality.
The research consultancy defines distributed file systems and object storage as "software and hardware solutions that offer object and/or scale-out file technology to …

Fujitsu slashed the vocal chords of its UK employee consultation committee before it confirmed to personnel that mass redundancies were to take place, El Reg can reveal.
Some 1,800 of the rank and file were told their jobs were being put "at risk" earlier in October, but sources told us that just prior to this they’d been …

Comment The use of disk drives to store performance data for enterprises is declining and, flash drives - SSDs - are taking their place. A wave of all-flash array (AFA) to disk array migration is starting to wash across data centres as generations of disk drive arrays give way to ones built with NAND flash drives. The tipping …

+Comment
An OpenCAPI consortium has sprung into life, promising a new, open specification that can increase data center server performance up to 10x through the use of a new CPU-memory-IO adapter interconnect scheme – and it doesn't include Intel in its membership.
The Open Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface represents, the …

Cisco exec Richard Roberts has split from the organisation after a decade in various senior positions, but told us it was his decision to exit and that he was not caught up in the recent wave of company redundancies.
Roberts, who was UK and Ireland managing director for partner and commercial sales before he left this month, …

IT giant Fujitsu is to axe 1,800 jobs in Blighty – around 13 per cent of its UK workforce.
The Japanese godzilla denied the move was driven by Brexit but was intended to allow to "better compete and grow in today’s global IT marketplace."
A Fujitsu spokesman said the company is planning a transformation program that will …

Enterprise solid state drives are gaining traction, but their predominant focus is still performance. The need for speed has driven SSDs into applications where HDDs previously reigned, but for those of us who aren’t high-frequency traders, solid state will need to demonstrate some other benefits. What are they, and how …

If the rhetoric from the latest chief straddling Fujitsu’s UK Technology Product Group (TPG) sounds familiar, it’s because it is.
James Johnston quietly took over from Tom Roche two months ago but his change of role was not the only move at TPG; more recently, sales director Kevin Matthew jumped ship, perhaps before he was …

Fujitsu might well be talking to interested parties, including Lenovo, about offloading its withering PC business but has asked staff to maintain the party line on its “absolute commitment” to customers.
The Japanese HQ’d organisation yesterday issued a statement following reports in the Nikkei Asian Review that it was locked …

Panasas and Western Digital are combining high-speed data access and low-cost, bulk data storage for life sciences researchers through a partnership and integration exercise centred on the open-source data management software iRODS.
The use of the systems is described here. This is how it works:
Lab equipment generates data …

Fujitsu has become the latest sub-scale PC maker to consider exiting the client market amid ongoing talks with potential buyers including Lenovo.
The Japanese giant reacted to a report in the Nikkei Asian Review this morning that put Lenovo, the world’s biggest shifter of PC tin, as the leading candidate to gobble the business …

Comment
HPE's Synergy is, it thinks, the next great advance in servers and is far more capable than hyper-converged infrastructure systems, being able to provision bare metal as well as servers for virtual workloads as well as containerised ones.
Getting a grip on this beast is tricky. Is it a form of dynamically reconfigurable …

NHS Digital is planning to work closely with the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) to improve security for hospitals and other healthcare units.
The role was revealed days before the NCSC, a UK government-run national cyber incident response bureau, opens its door for business next month.
“NHS Digital, along with other …

Analysis
If IT wasn't perceived to be such a boring topic by Joe Public, the amount the government still spends on expensive clunky technology would be viewed as a national scandal.
Across the entire public sector the annual figure has been pegged at around £20bn. No one knows for sure.
As long as Whitehall's money is locked into …

It is all change at the top of Fujitsu’s product business with UK sales director Kevin Matthews quitting after he struggled to get the revenue dial moving in the right direction, sources have told us.
Former HP veteran Matthews signed up to lead the vendor’s direct sales and channel organisation in October. He joined amid …

A public sector contracts fat cat and some household PC brands are among the suppliers that failed to directly win a place on a mega pan-government hardware and software framework contract, according to a preliminary list seen by The Register.
The Technology Products (TP) 2 agreement, worth up to £4bn over four years, is due …

Comment
A new phase of disruption is hitting the performance data storage array market, giving new, old, startup and struggling all-flash array vendors a shot at making it big by using NVMe flash drives and NVMe Fabric-class connectivity to provide direct-attached SSD performance from external arrays.
The charge is being led by Dell- …

ABI Research analyst Marina Lu has picked iris scanning as "one of the safest" means to secure user identities on smartphones.
The Singapore-based researcher says the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 released last month will help spread the technology and increase adoption of mobile payments.
Lu says the biometric authentication …

Fujitsu's monster ARM-powered supercomputer, the Post-K, will miss its 2020 deadline.
The $910m project has stalled because its engineers need more time to design, test and perfect the machine's processors, we can confirm.
Fujitsu was hired by Japan's boffinry nerve-center RIKEN to produce a roughly 1,000 peta-FLOPS …

Two Fujitsu semiconductor businesses are licensing Nantero NRAM technology with joint Nantero-Fujitsu development to produce chips in 2018. They will have several thousand times faster rewrites and many thousands of times more rewrite cycles than embedded flash memory.
NRAM, non-volatile RAM, is based on carbon nanotube (CNT) …

A couple of industry greybeards at Lenovo and Hewlett Packard Enterprise have quietly packed their bags for a permanent vacation while another vendor old timer has moved to another channel biz.
Steve Kendall-Smith, executive director at Lenovo has split after half a decade at the company - he had run the large enterprise and …

If you worry the Internet of Things is bollocks and that the industry's just milking an old idea, think again: research outfit Arcluster has declared that the “Connected Cow and Farm” market will become a US$10.75 billion concern in 2021, a rather nice jump from today's $1.27 billion.
Byte-blowing bovines are going to drive …

Hot Chips
Fujitsu chose 64-bit ARM CPU cores for its upcoming exascale supercomputer for two reasons: Linux and the ability to customize its own processors.
It was a bit of a surprise when the Japanese IT giant picked ARMv8-A over SPARC64 and x86 for its Post-K beast, which will be used by Japanese boffins to carry out climate-change …

Hot Chips
ARM is bolting an extra data-crunching engine onto its 64-bit processor architecture to get it ready for Fujitsu's Post-K exascale supercomputer.
Specifically, ARM is adding a Scalable Vector Extension (SVE) to its ARMv8-A core architecture. SVE can handle vectors from 128 to 2,048 bits in length. This technology is not an …

The UK's Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) collected £400m less in tax during the first 12 months of moving paper tax discs online, according to a Freedom of Information response.
From October 2014 to September 2015, the DVLA collected £5.71bn in vehicle excise duty, £412m lower than in the previous 12 months - …